Education in a Changing World, The Conference

I thought I would take some time to give my thoughts/interaction with the fascinating "Education in a Changing World" Conference. I'm going to work hard to constrain this to elegant brevity, or perhaps just brevity. You can be the judge. I'm also going to leave the names of the speakers out, and instead interact with their ideas.

The idea behind the conference was to address the methodological changes necessary to address the educational needs of students in the "emerging" era--that is, the technological/information age. It is, after all, an age in which students can Google the best teachers in various subjects, so why should they require their present classroom instructors? The universe of information is available to them via their iPads, so who needs their physics teacher Mildred, a slightly overweight graduate of Iowa State University?

I'll begin with what I thought was lacking in the conference.

1. There was a fatuous, and unjustified, doctrinal assumption made: In a technologically malleable world, malleable teachers will win the hearts and minds of students.

In other words, the problem with failing students is the methods, or manner, of the teacher. Use iPads and be generally loving and all students, even those from the most fragmented and destructive of homes, will flourish. Take a child from the inner city, raised in poverty, abandoned by his father, pressured by gangs, addicted to drugs, envious, angry and impatient with learning, and simply give him a loving teacher and an iPad and all in the garden will be lovely. Let us be kind and call this perhaps an oversimplification.

Formal institutional education is not the antidote to all human evil. It is not the family. It is not the church. It is not the just society. It is not the cross of Jesus Christ! It is what it is. The megalomaniacy of the various speakers at this conference was almost crippling in its uniformity. According to them, the good teacher (meaning the "friend" teacher who is also a brilliant iTeacher) can unhinge the bounty of heaven for deprived children. Great theater, but also spurious, to say the least.

What if we come to the task of education with an assumption of depravity? If it is true that humankind is in natural rebellion against God's truth, then the advocates of God's truth are not going to be received with enthusiasm, and perhaps most of the time, even if they are loving and technologically savvy. Take a student who is in rebellion against God's right to inform Him, but whose teacher is exceptional, according to the standards of this conference, and that student will still hate the truth. Or perhaps he will be persuaded to love the methods and the teacher while caring little for the truth. Or perhaps he will become, as Lewis suggested, "a more clever devil." Just as a forced redistribution of wealth would not change a thing if the human heart is not first changed, so would a forced redistribution of the riches of excellent education. Tell me that technology is a tool and that my responsibility as a teacher is to care about people and I'm with you. Tell me that on my shoulders rests the burden of saving the souls of every individual I encounter and I demure for fear of blasphemy.

2. The fog of pseudo-intellectualism was stifling!

The charge of pseudo-intellectualism is a serious change. I'm not claiming this because I'm obviously more intelligent than the people delivering talks at the conference. I'm only claiming it because any 8th grader armed with introductory teaching in logic could see that many, if not most, of the keynote speakers violated basic principles of logic. They would probably call such principles merely "one man's story," and thus irrelevant to them, and thus not applicable to their "narrative." Their narrative is no doubt bigger than logic. The fact remains that these conference speakers (most of them) were wholly incoherent. They were engaging and they were passionate, but their ideas made absolutely no sense. Curious that at an education conference we saw before us perhaps no purer example of the general cultural move away from logos to pathos and ethos. And that is why they received standing ovations. Here were their incoherent claims:

a. Standards in education are irrelevant. What counts is the journey of the student, or the student's "story." Then these speakers would go on to say how we are doing things wrong, how we are failing to reach students using the "traditional," especially lecture, methods. In short, "standards are irrelevant, and you are doing things all wrong." But of course, how can they judge that we, or those slow to adopt the "changing world," are doing things wrong unless there is some standard by which to adjudicate the claims of that world and this world? This of course is contradictory to anyone who thinks steadily about it for five minutes.

b. "Worldview" language is passé. That is the language of "industrialization" and "generalization." But then they would go on to say that we need to be able to judge what is good and bad in "narratives." Apparently, we don't need to rely on any worldview presuppositions regarding what counts as good and bad to be able to judge what is good and bad in various "narratives." Of course, this is contradictory to anyone who thinks steadily about it for four minutes.

c. No grades, only process! I sat with one of the workshop speakers who profoundly pontificated regarding the virtues of abandoning grades and harsh exclusionary pronouncements for lovingly leading students into excellence. I almost wept, but he didn't know why I almost wept. It wasn't because of his sagacity, though no doubt his sycophants have conditioned him to believe that the stunned look on my face was a prelude to emotional splutterings acknowledging his "genius." The fact is that I was simply shocked. He said in one moment that we should do away with grades and the next moment that we must "hold students accountable" for their "proficiencies" and "growth" and "skill development." Of course none of this amounts to a "grade." The amazing thing is that he literally cannot see the equivocation and contradiction here. Surely anyone who thinks steadily about it for three minutes can see the contradiction.

d. We must use advances in technology for guided "collaborative learning" rather than lecture. Then we attend a conference in which we sit through eight lectures from people who allegedly know more than we do about education, and with minimal to no collaborative input. Dr. Expert doesn't apparently need the help of someone who has thought long and hard about education for 17 years, and who might be just as intelligent as he is. The funny thing here is that the message the format sends is one I agree with (that is--I think there are people who know more about education than I do and we should listen), but I cannot abide the contradiction of advocating "collaborative learning" and "modern methods," then using the same "unidirectional," "pedantic" and "traditional" methods so constantly vilified. It is a contradiction to anyone who thinks steadily about it for two minutes.

e. Education is about storytelling and not propositional statements... but let me interpret the story for you and the truths that I learned that can be applied to you even though this is not your story. Let me give you the transnarrative ideas (the abstract ideas applicable to anyone's story)! Emotionally engaging storytelling was advocated by just about everyone. Here I think my criticism is minimal and centers around the idea pushed by so many that we are about helping students learn and tell stories and we are not about propositional statements, which are boring, clearly. The curious thing is that each of the speakers carefully interpreted their stories and made propositional truth claims applicable to others. Now that is a puzzle if our goal is stories and not propositional truth claims. The either/or language is merely unnecessary and the context of the whole presentation was contradictory to anyone who thinks steadily about it for a minute or so. Advocate stories without vilifying propositional claims.

Let me confess my critical nature. I have come to a place in my life where I am almost wholly impatient with the kind of things I heard at this conference. I know that a lot of it is "conference speak." And by conference speak I mean this sort of thing: "Those people 5 years ago had it all wrong. They said read, but we say speak! They said walk, but we say run! They said return to nature, but we say get an iPad! They had it all wrong. We have it all right. And my book, which details how we have it right, is on sale on iTunes." Much of it is nothing more than the soaring rhetoric of definition by contrast. Highlight where they went wrong. Show two examples of where you went right. Site some carefully selected research to back your shallow claim, then press the matter with pseudo-intellectual zeal, augmented by pathos and ethos, and you win a few people, perhaps even most of the people. And five years later someone is out promoting the opposite position with the same methods and he also seduces most of the people.

On last minor thing: Jesus Christ was wholly absent from these talks. Oh, the window dressing was there, but Jesus had no interpenetrating influence on what these people were saying. Apparently, "education in a changing world" does not require the changeless one! Jesus, after all, didn't employ an iPad, so how legitimate can he be? I thought I was listening to a gaggle of Ted talkers. The homogeneity was perplexing from a gaggle (yes, I used gaggle twice) of people advocating diversity of instruction. Surely we often say as much by what is not communicated as by what is communicated. What does Jesus have to do with technology? What does Jesus have to do with selfless sacrifice in the classroom? What does Jesus have to do with the ever changing world of education, with college entrance, with physics on the iPad? According to the conference I just attended, Jesus has absolutely nothing to do with any of it, and you can be a first rate teacher without reference to the wisdom of Jesus. Steve Jobs and Ken Robinson have a lot more to say about educating the young than does Jesus Christ!